200th Anniversary Year of Ajanta Cave Wall Paintings: Ajanta Cave 29

Summary: Acclaimed waterfalls attract tourists to areas around Ajanta cave 29 in the 200th anniversary year of European access to Ajanta cave wall paintings.

view of Ajanta Cave 29 (center) and Ajanta Cave 21 (lower left); Ajanta Caves, Maharashtra, west-central India; Oct. 26, 2017: Ms Sarah Welch, CC BY SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Time, tourism and trouble act less aggressively, less antagonistically upon Ajanta cave 29 in the 200th anniversary year of European access to Ajanta cave wall paintings in central-north Maharashtra state, central-west India.

Itinerant artisans and monks built Ajanta cave 29 during the last of two excavations, between the fifth century and the sixth, seventh or eighth century B.C. Ajanta cave 29 communicates the architectural and artistic character and configuration of one of five chaitya (from Sanskrit चैत्य, "funeral mound, pedestal or pile") prayer halls. The 2,000- to 2,300-year-old Ajanta caves 9 and 10 and the 1,300- to 1,600-year-old Ajanta caves 19 and 26 demonstrate painted, sculpted chaitya prayer hall designs.

Ajanta cave 29, whose enumeration expresses discovery sequence, not excavation date or physical location between Ajanta caves 20 and 21, endures as an off-limits, unfinished experience.

Nothing familiarizes academic and non-academic audiences with the environmental, political and socio-economic factors that finished forming near-perpendicular cliff faces into cave monasteries and cavern prayer halls.

The Ajanta Caves, the Sahyadri (from Sanskrit सह्याद्रि, "benevolent") hill surrounds and the Waghora (from Sanskrit व्याघ्र, "tiger") River bend glen below guard no physical evidence. Ajanta cave 29 and vihara (from Sanskrit विहार, "walking") monasteries 21, 22, 23, 25, 27 and 28 harbor nothing that honed basalt into halls and homes. Gatis Pāvils of the Wonders of the World website imagines chisels, hammers and pickaxes for issuing sculpted monasteries with cells and prayer halls with pillared aisles.

Nobody journeys to off-limits, unfinished Ajanta cave 29 for chiseled, plastered, painted Ajanta cave wall paintings and sculptures in the 200th anniversary year of European access.

Ajanta cave 29 and none other of the Ajanta Caves keep tools for chiseled, rough ceilings and walls for wet clay, dung, hay and lime plaster.

Ajanta cave 29 lodges no graffiti April 28, 1819, by John Smith, 28th Cavalry Captain for the Madras presidency and Colonel Henry Martin Lockhead Smith's great-great-grandfather. It manifests not only nothing of Ajanta cave 10's European graffiti but also nothing of its inscription of patronage by Kanhaka of Bahada and Vasisthiputra Katahadi. It nets no more contemporaneous inscriptions, such as those from Harishena's emperorship the last 25 years of the Vākātaka dynasty (250?-500?) in Ajanta chaitya cave 26.

Ajanta cave 29 offers no documented, incised or painted observations of occupants, operators and organizers in the 200th anniversary year of European-accessed Ajanta cave wall paintings.

And yet Xuanzang (602-Feb. 5, 664), Buddhist itinerant monk and scholar from ancient China's Henan Province, presented the Ajanta Caves as patronized by plentiful, productive practitioners.

The descendant of Eastern Han dynasty official Chen Shi (104-187) queued up among permanent residents Dignāga (480?-540?), philosopher of perception- and sensation-, inference- and reasoning-based knowledge. The Bhils people of Chhattisgarh, Gujarat, Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Tripura states, as ancient and modern neighbors of Ajanta Caves, realize Pithora house wall paintings. And yet their ritualistic paintings on three of four interior walls never share any secrets of the ancient shapers of Ajanta cave wall paintings and sculptures.

Thrilling trails near Sat Kund (Seven Pools) Waterfalls, not off-limits, unfinished Ajanta cave 29, tempt tourists in the 200th anniversary year of Ajanta cave wall paintings.

view of Ajanta Cave 29 (above right) and Ajanta Cave 21 (lower left); Ajanta Caves, Maharashtra, west-central India; Oct. 26, 2017: Deviprasad, via Wikimedia Commons

Acknowledgment

My special thanks to talented artists and photographers/concerned organizations who make their fine images available on the internet.

Image credits:

view of Ajanta Cave 29 (center) and Ajanta Cave 20 (lower left); Ajanta Caves, Maharashtra, west-central India; Oct. 26, 2017: Ms Sarah Welch, CC BY SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons @ https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ajanta_Cave_29_frontal_view.jpg

view of Ajanta Cave 29 (above right) and Ajanta Cave 20 (lower left); Ajanta Caves, Maharashtra, west-central India; Oct. 26, 2017: Deviprasad, via Wikimedia Commons @ https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ajanta_Cave_29_exterior_view.jpg

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